Nur Isabella Andrews is a visual artist currently pursuing a BA(Hons) in Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts. Specialising in graphic novel, she gained interest in sequential and narrative art, and is now experimenting with video art as a medium for her story telling.

“My work is a reflection of how I imagine the universe began, my definition and idea of how we came to be and explorations of the relationship between delusion and reality. With influences from conspiracy theories of the New World Order and esoteric philosophy, new insights of how I perceive the world are synthesized from both mundane and transcendent meanings. Using my artwork and its processes I aim to question and explore the ambiguity of life, culture and time.

My aim is to explore the different ways the elites are able to control the population, who do not share the same status through subliminal messaging and propaganda broadcasted by the mass media. The intention with my works is to cause the feeling of discomfort and paranoia to its viewers.

My work also explores existential questions of how we, as living species, are created and have conformed in the world in which we have created. In this work I am questioning the higher states of consciousness for example, are we being watched by beings that are our so called ‘creators’ or are we social experiments and do we really matter in the universe?

Focusing on these questions, I intended to create work that is a commentary on the conspiracy theories that have inspired me, such as David Ickes theory of mind controlling space lizards and the government tactic of MK Ultra. Although not always serious, I also intend to add bantered elements into my final pieces.

I decided to make my video appear as if an alien species is trying to communicate to us through the television. They are reaching out to us as a warning, for an unknown reason. It is probably meant to remind us that we are all a social experiment and nothing we do matters. But who knows?”

Having majored in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts, Moses Tan‘s work flits between disciplines and includes drawings, video and sound installations. “I was also formerly trained in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry and I’m interested in exploring ideas of poetry and allegories that can be found from theories in Chemistry.”

Mo’s work revolves around themes of queer politics and sociopolitical issues, and pulls inspiration from the theories of philosophers Judith Butler and Karen Barad. In 2016, he picked up the Winston Oh Travel Award which allowed him to travel to Beijing and extend his research on queer issues.

“The award allowed me to conduct field research in Beijing, which got me to look at ideas of corrective therapy for queer individuals. With that, ideas of denial and rejection helped to enhance my understanding of queer melancholia as a result of denial of desires so as to fit into a heteronormative society. Through my research trip, some of the methods of corrective therapy ranged from counselling to electroshock therapy and one of the methods used was to snap a rubber band on the wrist any time an ‘unwanted’ desire occurs. I also managed to survey two cruising sites which coincidentally had slopes where the cruising would normally occur. The work is a translation of all these ideas where a fictional mountain (the name is formed from the two parks that were the cruising sites) and in that way, posing the mountain as a metaphor for the body. Also inspired by a text by Karen Bermann about spaces and by the peony flower which is an unofficial national flower of China. I was interested in the metaphorical nature of the peony flower (which in Chinese is also mudane) which was then translated into a book where images of the sites were hidden.”

Unless you’ve spent the last couple of weeks in a hole, you’ll have seen My Kind of Town, the multimedia feature about the people of Potong Pasir and their former Member of Parliament, Mr Chiam See Tong.

The feature is the final-year project by four students of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (NTU) each with a different skill set, and earlier this week they launched a website which gives you unfettered virtual access to the Potong Pasir community from 6am till 12am.

Meet the team …

Cara Chiang, the team’s producer. “It was a real challenge to undertake such an ambitious project within the short time that we had. But it’s rewarding to have covered such a meaningful and important topic.”

Edward Teo, the team’s photographer. “As much as the team had created content over the months, we also learnt a lot about Singapore politics and Potong Pasir in the process. Although there were often endless nights of work, it was never boring for us.”

Sulaiman Daud, the team’s editor and writer. “When we started I knew Mr Chiam was a fairly successful politician, but over the course of the project I was struck by the immense respect for him from nearly everyone we spoke to. Potong Pasir residents, politicians, academics – even if they didn’t agree with his views they respected the hard work he put into the estate over his career. For me it demonstrated that a life of service is never regretted.”

Wong Kar Weng, the team’s videographer. “Embarking on this project was fraught with much uncertainty and self-doubt. Nonetheless, I was glad to follow this project through to the end because we saw a story that deserves to be documented.”

Samsung Electronics Co., recently launched Masterpieces, a digital art gallery with a collection of contributed artworks by established and emerging artists created with the Samsung GALAXY Note 10.1 LTE.

To further fuel the discovery of new talents, Samsung worked with selected art schools such as LASALLE, School of the Arts (SOTA) and Raffles Design Institute (RDI) in Singapore. As part of their course curriculum, students were invited to contribute creative artworks created on the GALAXY Note 10.1 LTE.

A total of 32 selected student works are now displayed in the gallery. These were reviewed and unanimously selected by a panel of industry veterans including Masterpieces curator, Iola Lenzi, artist and filmmaker, Ho Tzu Nyen, Esplanade’s Visual Arts programming officer, Tamares Goh and arts journalist from The Straits Times, Deepika Shetty. These artworks were selected based on the students’ ability to maximise the use of technology as they relate stories through their creations.

Viddsee partners with Singapore Short Film Awards (SSFA) 2013 to showcase nominated short films from past editions of SSFA. The new online social watching platform, streams short films from Southeast Asia and streamlines the process of discovering, watching and sharing regional stories for a global online audience.

Viddsee is co-founded by filmmaker-engineers Ho Jia Jian and Derek Tan. The duo is passionate about the marriage between art and technology and aims to grow the community of short film audience by enabling a wide and accessible market reach for short films.

“Working with local filmmakers and film festivals to make local content accessible is key to grooming our local content audience. We have collaborated with local filmmakers like Kelvin Sng and Ray Pang in premiering their short films online. For this year’s SSFA, which runs at The Substation from the 25th February to 3rd March, SSFA will showcase some of its nominated films from last year’s awards on Viddsee. Audience can expect a line-up of 9 short films with one film released everyday at 7pm starting from 15th February 2013 .